Her mouth dropped open, but he did not allow a reaction. He strolled from the room, his step just a little lighter.
Sarah stared at the closed door from which Kit had just departed. She was…astounded. He hadkissedher. Thoroughly. Oh, so thoroughly. Her mouth still tingled, her body still burned, and for the first time in her life, she understood why someone would throw everything away for just a taste of such passion.
Not to mention he’d said he wouldn’t sack her. The weight that removed from her chest…she felt like she could take a full breath for the first time since she was hired and realized Kit would soon hold the keys to her fate.
But now that both those things had been done, now that he’d left her with a promise of more kissing, she was flummoxed. Where the hell did they stand since the world had been turned on its head?
It seemed they were no longer enemies, but what could they be if not that? That had been her entire definition of what they were for three long years.
She got up slowly, resting her hand on the high edge of his bed to steady herself. She really felt fine, just a little tired and achy, like she’d run a long way. Run from death.
Pushing those thoughts away, she looked around the room. It had been the room of Kit’s father until a few weeks ago, when the old duke requested to be moved to a chamber that overlooked the orchard rather than the garden. What a solemn day that move had been, for everyone had known that he would never return to his own bed.
The chamber already felt like Kit’s. It was masculine, the walls in dark colors with wood accents, but understated. It was filled with his personal things. She glanced over her shoulder at the door to be certain no one was going to see her spy. Then she stepped up to a little table near the fire. It was covered with miniatures of his family and his friends.
She leaned in and examined the one of Phoebe. It had been painted a few years ago—the little girl could not have been more than two, but she still had the same wide smile and bright eyes. There was a miniature of his father, as well. A younger man, healthier than the one who had hired her and treated her so kindly. There was a miniature of a woman beside the other two, and she picked it up carefully.
This must have been his mother. Sarah had researched the family over the years. She would have loved to say that her questions were only about taking this position, but it had been long before that. After Kit had caught her speaking so sharply to Meg, she’d looked into his life. Obsessed over it, some would say…if they knew.
She shook the thoughts away. Kit’s mother had died when he was just fifteen, and the miniature reflected a younger woman. Beautiful. That was where Kit had inherited those fine cheekbones, clearly.
She set the picture down in just the place where she’d found it and sighed as she glanced at the other pictures, set back from the ones of his immediate family. His friends, pictures old and new.
He loved them like brothers. She’d seen the bonds between the men during the last days of Kit’s father’s life. She envied that he had so many to love him, to comfort him as he grieved.
She walked away from the pictures and back toward the bed. On the bedside table she spied a stack of books. She hesitated. Looking at his reading material seemed almost more intimate than the portraits of those he loved. One could judge a man by what he read. It said so much about his soul.
There was a book on the history of Kingsacre, well thumbed through, by the looks of it. But beneath it was a slim volume,Lyrical Balladsby Wordsworth and Coleridge. Her heart skipped a beat, for she had brought the same volume of poetry with her in her scant belongings. There was a page marked, and she opened it to find it was the ballad “Strange fits of passion have I known.” She read the flowing words, though she already knew them by heart.
Strange fits of passion have I known.
And I will dare to tell.
But in the Lover’s ear alone,
What once to me befell.
She set the book aside with a shiver. Kit had always appeared to her to be not a man of passions. He’d always exhibited such coldness toward her…until today.
Today his obvious love of the poem made so much more sense. The idea of Kit with strange fits of passion…well, it made her body tingle as much as his lips had.
He’d said he wanted more of those kinds of passions with her. What could she do about that? Was it truly possible to accept his advances? Accept that he wanted her? Would it one day cause her more grief than she’d already felt? And what about her reputation, such that it was? She’d been trained to protect it, but she was no longer a young lady on the marriage mart. Could a governess give in to desire without destroying her life?
She moved away from his side of the bed and back to the other. The shadows outside were starting to loom and after the day’s events, she was ready to rest. To dream. She slid between Kit’s sheets and sighed. She still had no idea what to do about any of it. But perhaps tomorrow her next move would be clearer.
Perhaps tomorrow she would have some answers.
Kit stood in the antechamber between his dressing room and his bedroom, and stared at the door that separated him from Sarah. In the hours since he’d left her, as the evening grew long, she was all he could think about. Her heroics, her near death, and most of all, the sweet surrender of her mouth and body when he claimed her lips in a shocking display.
He should have been ashamed of what he’d done, for it was against his character entirely. He wasn’t.
He cracked the door and peered inside. The fire had burned down low, but the dim light still cascaded over Sarah’s form in his bed. His body reacted of its own accord, tightening with desire as he looked at her in his shirt, half covered by his sheets, blonde hair wild from sleep.
She looked like a woman who had been well loved. And God, how he wanted to be the one who had put her in that kind of state.
But he wanted other things, too. Dangerous things like to protect her. To keep her close and never let anything bad ever happen to her again. He wanted to see her laugh, be carefree in a way she couldn’t when she was a servant employed under the fickle pleasure of a master like him.
He shuddered as he closed the door and left her to sleep. Something had shifted in the moment since Meg had asked him if he’d been jealous of Simon, and this moment when she lay in his bed.
